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Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD 256GB Review (Page 10 of 11)

Page 10 - Benchmark: PCMark 8

About PCMark 8

PCMark 8 is the latest version in our series of popular PC benchmarking tools. It is designed to test the performance of all types of PC, from tablets to desktops. With five separate benchmark tests plus battery life testing, PCMark 8 helps you find the devices that offer the perfect combination of efficiency and performance. PCMark 8 is the complete PC benchmark for home and business.

PCMark 8 Storage Consistency Test is one of our favorite benchmarks, but also one of the more taxing ones too. Nowadays, many drives are well optimized for high benchmark scores when they are empty, but what separates the professional players from the amateurs is how it stands up to a truly punishing workload. PCMark 8's Storage Consistency Test is designed exactly for this purpose. Going through five phases -- precondition, degradation, steady state, recovery, and clean up -- to extend beyond real world application simulations, this benchmark takes around two days to complete, but the results are revealing of a SSD's true capabilities. Unfortunately, the Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD did not fare well in these tests. If you look at our first graph, which compares the Gigabyte SSD against one of the best recent M.2 drives we have reviewed, the Patriot Hellfire M.2 240GB, and the numbers were not even close. In this case, the Hellfire speeds were 429%, 407%, and 300% of the Gigabyte M.2 PCIe SSD in degradation, steady, and recovery phases respectively. Taking a comparison to the Toshiba RC100 240GB, you can see these numbers were far more comparable, as the Gigabyte was faster than the Toshiba in degradation by 53% and steady by 42%, but slower in recovery by 41%. One common theme between these two drives is the fact both of these drives rely on system memory with its use of host memory buffer or HMB. You can see compared to the UD PRO, which had its own onboard memory, the M.2 PCIe SSD posted noticeably slower numbers, especially in the degradation and steady phases, despite being based on the faster NVMe standard. I will say however, the scores are pretty consistent across each of the phases, which is a positive thing.